Printed textile substrate and process for making
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current printing technologies for textile substrates, such as floorcoverings, face challenges in achieving in-register designs due to issues like substrate bow, skew, and shrinkage during manufacturing, leading to misalignment and loss of design detail, especially when cutting carpet tiles from larger rolls.
Innovation Solution
The use of a digital printing machine that detects and aligns with physical cues like tufted yarn heights, yarn luster, and color to apply print compositions precisely in predetermined locations on the substrate, ensuring in-register printing across areas with varying tufted designs and pile heights.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If traditional printing processes are used on textile substrates, then printing can be performed, but alignment and registration precision is lost due to substrate bow, skew, and shrinkage during manufacture
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by embedding registration markers or physical cues into the textile substrate during the tufting or weaving process, before the printing operation. These markers serve as reference points that the digital printing system can detect and use to compensate for substrate distortion, ensuring accurate print registration despite bow, skew, or shrinkage that occurs during manufacturing and installation.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements feedback by using a scanning system to detect the actual position and orientation of registration markers on the substrate surface, then using this information to adjust the printing process in real-time. The system continuously monitors substrate position and feeds this data back to the print head control system, allowing dynamic compensation for dimensional changes and maintaining registration precision throughout the printing operation.
2Manufacturing precision
If digital printing is used to achieve in-register designs, then design precision can be maintained, but the complexity of the printing system increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses registration markers as an intermediary element between the substrate and the printing system. These markers serve as a common language that both the substrate construction process and the digital printing system can understand and reference. By introducing this intermediary, the system achieves precise design alignment without requiring complex real-time substrate measurement and adjustment mechanisms, thereby reducing overall system complexity while maintaining high precision.
3Adaptability or versatility
If carpet tiles are cut from larger rolls, then installation flexibility improves, but alignment and registration detail is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies segmentation by placing multiple registration markers throughout the substrate, including at cut lines and edges of carpet tiles. This allows each tile to be independently identified and positioned during installation while maintaining registration with adjacent tiles. The segmented marker system enables flexible tile cutting and rearrangement without losing overall pattern alignment, as each tile carries its own reference information for precise reassembly.
Data Source
AI summary
This invention relates to a printed textile substrate, such as a floorcovering article, and a process for making a printed textile substrate. This invention provides the process and steps to print color patterns in-register with physical patterns, such as varying yarn pile heights, yarn luster, yarn color, and the like. This process provides many unique aesthetics on a textile substrate that cannot be created another way.